Is the historian truly counseling a second reading of his works?
Yes, he is!
And shamelessly!
Let it clearly be stated that a second reading is not just to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is a True History, one which faithfully strives to render the tangled complexities of life itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single reading will not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so how should they be clearcut plain to the onlooker?
Read then this history a second time!
If this suggestion seems bizarre, then know that it is not entirely without precedent. Your true scholar will give a book a generation if the text be worthy. And if the book be sufficiently irregular in its verbs, why then, a true scholar will stand content to pore its pages for the better part of a millennium, and think the time well spent.
Yet this is a counsel of perfection, impossible for those whose brief mortality makes the pursuit of such perfection an unattainable ideal. So, in case the constraints of that mortal disease called life make a second reading impossible, let the date be restated, and hammered down, and branded on the mind.
It was spring, and early spring at that. It was the year Alliance 4306, and Guest Gulkan in his adolescent youth had attained the unholy age of 16, surely one of the most perilous of ages in the whole passage from babyhood to manhood. The boy Guest, the self-styled Weaponmaster, had then been in residence on Safrak's ruling island for upwards of a year; and in that year had engaged in an unholy amount of drinking, gambling and troublemaking, none of which will be detailed here – which is not to suggest that any of it had escaped the notice of his elders.
In the early spring of that year, the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl – gray in beard and gray in eye, he whom Guest Gulkan had dueled for the favors of the woman Yerzerdayla – came to Safrak's ruling island to summon the Witchlord's son home to Gendormargensis.
Thodric Jarl did not come alone. He traveled with friendly swords to guard his back, for the countryside was in disorder. A tax revolt centered on Locontareth had quite got out of hand, and Lord Onosh was marching to war against the rebels. The Witchlord wished the Weaponmaster to march to battle at his side, hence had sent Jarl to fetch the young man.
By this time, the influenza epidemic which had decimated Safrak a year previously was but an almost- forgotten incident in history. The Collosnon Empire had heard nothing of that epidemic.
All those people had died without Lord Onosh, Jarl, or Bao Gahai, or any other in Gendormargensis learning of their deaths. Bones become dust but the blood goes on.
While Jarl had heard nothing of the epidemic – and was destined to learn nothing – he had heard much of the island of Alozay, center of all trade between the Collosnon Empire and Port Domax (Port Domax being a free city placed many leagues distant on the shores of the Great Ocean of Moana).
Lord Onosh had given Thodric Jarl no orders to scout for the means whereby Alozay might be defeated, and to Jarl's best knowledge the Witchlord had no designs on the Safrak Islands.
Nevertheless, as a boat brought Jarl and his comrades to the Palace Docks at the foot of the mainrock Pinnacle, Jarl studied all with a warrior's eye, and committed all to memory.
Jarl could see no certain way to storm the heights, since the rocks above overhung the docks of Alozay, and to gain the heights one had to be winched up to a drop-hole which gaped in the living rock far, far above.
Still, presumably the mainrock Pinnacle could be taken by siege, assuming one had boats enough, and patience sufficient.
At the dockside, Jarl was met by a yellow-skinned cur-dog which bit at his boots, then by a tall and sallow junior Banker, a young man with crooked teeth and breath so bad it scared away the dog. The junior Banker addressed Jarl in the Eparget of the Yarglat. Jarl's native tongue was Rovac, but war had made him the master of a good half-dozen languages, with Eparget the latest to be subdued to his possession. Thus he was able to explain himself.
The junior Banker heard Jarl's mission then told him that he and his comrades would have to wait.
'None of you can proceed,' said the junior Banker, 'until at least one of you has been properly identified and vouched for. You must get a security clearance before you can be allowed to proceed.'
Thodric Jarl protested vehemently, and demanded to see the Governor of the Bank – but the Governor was unavailable.
'Someone already on Alozay must vouch for you before you can be allowed to proceed,' said the junior Banker, with the repetitive instincts of either a born parrot or a born bureaucrat.
'But I don't know anyone on Alozay!' said Jarl.
'Then,' said the junior Banker, 'you are going to be waiting at the docks for a long time.'
So Jarl admitted to knowing Rolf Thelemite, who was produced in order that he might identify Jarl. Thodric Jarl glowered at Rolf Thelemite, who smiled. Though both these worthies were Rovac warriors, the pair were by no means friends. Long, long ago, on a day when Jarl had been very drunk, Rolf Thelemite had defeated him in a fist fight, and Jarl still held a grudge against the man on that account. Rolf Thelemite knew as much.
'Ha-hmmm,' said Rolf Thelemite, as he inspected Jarl.
'Get it over with, man,' snapped Jarl. 'Tell them who I am.'
'Who are you supposed to be?' said Rolf.
'Stop being ridiculous!' said Jarl. 'You know full well who I am.'
'Do I?' said Rolf.
'Of course you do!' said Jarl. 'I'm Thodric Jarl, son of Oric Slaughterhouse, and blood of the clan of the bear.'
'Ha-hmm,' said Rolf. 'I did know a man named Thodric Jarl.
You could tell him because – what was it? A cow, that was it. This Jarl, he had a little cow tattooed on his throat. A pretty cow it was, with a small golden bell hanging from its own throat.'
Thodric Jarl's response was a roar of rage, but at last he calmed down, and allowed the junior Banker to uplift his beard to check for tattoos. To the Banker's patent amusement, there was indeed a little cow tattooed on Jarl's throat – a very pretty cow with a buttercup emblazoned on its flanks – and the design was completed by a pretty little bell colored to match the buttercup.
'Yes,' said Rolf, visually reacquainting himself with that tattoo, 'this is indeed the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl.'
'You,' said Jarl, speaking to Rolf in the Rovac tongue, 'I'll deal with you later!'
Then Jarl was consigned to a winch-basket, together with a sack of fish fillets, a woman with a teething baby, the Banker with breath so bad it could scare a dog, and with five heroically unscared dogs which had been for a constitutional walkabout on the docks.
When they were half-way up, the winch-rope jammed, and Jarl was left swinging for an eternity. Then the basket was at last hauled to its full height, and Jarl stepped out into the tunnel system of the mainrock Pinnacle. Having thus entered the Grand Palace of Alozay, Jarl waited until a number of his traveling companions had been winched up to join him, and then they went in force to seek out Guest Gulkan.
The mainrock Pinnacle: the spike of rock which rises from the Swelaway Sea on the island of Alozay, and which overlooks the city of Molothair. The mainrock is pierced and hollowed by the stairs and chambers of the Grand Palace of Alozay, in which is found the administrative machinery of Safrak and the precincts of the Safrak
Bank. In the same Grand Palace are the quarters occupied by Guest Gulkan and those who came with him from Gendormargensis.
It was then spring in the year Alliance 4306, as has been already stated, and Guest Gulkan had just recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday. At age 16, Guest was no wiser than he had been at birth, but the wizard Sken- Pitilkin was still relentlessly continuing those pedagogical labors which he had begun when Guest was aged but five.
Though Guest had acquired no one iota of wisdom in a full eleven years of instruction, he had won some knowledge of geography – he could tell the Pig from the Yolantarath, and Molothair from Gendormargensis – and was an enthusiastic student of ethnology. He had also made progress with some of the simpler languages, such as Toxteth – the language of beer-and-dice companions such as Hrothgar – and Galish.
Now Galish is of course but a poor toy for the intellect, being dismally deficient in the more complex
